CHAPTER 27
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The coffee machine finishes its cycle at seven forty, and AURA speaks before Julian does.
“Good morning, Evelyn. Your entry profile has been paused. Julian will be handling the gate personally from today.”
She says it the way she'd say there's frost on the lawn. There is frost on the lawn. It's been holding since the small hours, white and grainy along the flagstones, keeping the shape of every stone it sits on.
It's Monday. On a Monday I used to drive down for the site meeting at eight and be back before the dew burned off the orchard, and I've been telling myself all week that I'll do it again.
Julian doesn't look up from the paper.
I put my cup down slowly, because granite makes a noise out of anything you set on it without thinking about it first.
“You changed the code,” I say.
“Last night, after you'd gone up. It took the man about forty minutes, and he was extremely pleasant about the hour, which I honestly did not expect from anyone at eleven at night.”
He turns a page. He's been up since five, the way he's been up since five for the whole six years I've lived in this house, and at this hour the pressed line of him is a fact of the morning, like the light.
“The hearing is in eight days. Eight days of nobody coming up that drive who I haven't asked. That isn't a punishment, it's a quiet week.”
I count the flagstones through the window. There are nine of them between the door and the gravel, and I've walked them a thousand times, and this morning they're a distance I can measure and then stop.
“It's my gate as much as it's yours,” I say. “I'd like to be able to open it.”
“You can open it. You find me, and I'll open it, and I'll drive you anywhere you want to go — the diner, your sister's, the reservoir road you like in the cold.” He looks up then, and he's smiling, and the smile is not a performance, which is the difficult part.
“I'd rather be the one who takes you. I've spent a year being the man who wasn't there when you needed a lift.”
“Then write the code down for me, and neither of us has to go looking.”
“I'll write it down for you before I go up.”
He doesn't. He folds the paper into thirds, sets it on the sideboard squared to the edge, and touches the back of my head on his way past like you'd steady a picture that's gone crooked.
There's a pen in the drawer under the sideboard.
The drawer has never once been locked. Nothing in this house needs a lock when the man who lives in it can simply decline.
At the door he stops, because there's one more thing and he's saved it, the way he saves things.
“Simon's staying in the house this week.
I've put him in the reading nook — it's the warmest room in your wing and you're the one who told me the guest side doesn't hold heat once the frost starts.” He says it into the hallway, already going.
“It means you don't have to walk anywhere at night to be looked at. That was the whole point of it, love.”
“Would you like me to remind him?” AURA says.
“Please remind him at nine, and again at noon.”
“I'll remind him twice,” AURA says. “He's very good about reminders.”
The machine clicks over and goes quiet. Frost. Nine flagstones. Eight days.
At eleven I go up to the reading nook, and it's done already, and it's been done well.
My chair is where my chair has been for six years, at the angle I set it at, facing the window with the orchard in it.
Beside it there's a folding cot, made up square, blanket turned down six inches at the top.
A leather bag on the floor with a shoe-tree standing out of the mouth of it. Aldred's coat is on my hook.
The room smells of sandalwood aftershave. It has smelled of book glue and cold plaster since the first week I lived here.
“I asked for the room over the garage,” Aldred says from the doorway. “I want you to know that. Julian felt the distance was the problem, and it's his house, and I'm a guest in it.”
He's holding his glasses in one hand and cleaning them on his shirt, which is what a man does with his hands when he'd like them to be busy.
“I'm here for continuity of observation. I know how that sounds. It sounds like a man in your sitting room.”
“It sounds like a man in my sitting room who's been paid enough to say it out loud first.”
“That's fair, and I'd have said the same thing sitting where you're sitting.” He puts the glasses back on. “I'll keep to the cot and the corridor. If you want the door shut, say so, and it stays shut.”
“Will you be writing down what time I go to bed?”
“I'll be writing down whatever I see, and I'd rather you knew that than found it out later.” He straightens the blanket on the cot with two fingers, needlessly. “You're allowed to read every word of it. Most people never ask.”
“I'm asking now.”
“Then I'll bring it down at the end of the week, and you can tell me where I've been unfair.”
“The door doesn't have a lock on this side, Simon. It has a magnet, and the magnet answers to the house.”
He looks at the hinge as if he hasn't considered it, and I think he genuinely hasn't, and that's worse than if he'd lied to me about it. He's courteous. He's slightly embarrassed. Of every available option, that one takes the most out of me.
At three I walk the property the way I'd walk a building I'd been asked to certify. You don't start with the part that worries you. You start at the front and you go around, and you write down what's bearing and what isn't.
Keypad at the main gate. I key in the six digits my hands have known since the spring, and the panel gives me two descending notes, soft and well-mannered, a tone somebody was paid to design so it wouldn't upset anyone.
Yesterday there was a truck bench with a dog blanket on it and Cole's hand flat over mine, and he said my name slowly, like it was a whole sentence with a verb in it and everything.
Two notes, descending. Polite.
Pedestrian gate, twenty yards north. Dead — no light on the reader at all, which means it isn't refusing me, it's been taken out of the conversation.
Orchard fence. Deer wire to six feet, and I could get over it with a crate and a bad landing, and I won't, because from the reading nook window you can see the whole east run of that fence, and there is a man in the reading nook window.
Service gate at the bottom of the lane. New brass padlock, still bright, the shackle not yet gray where it rubs.
Garage roll doors. The little panel by the side entry reads SECURED in a green so mild it's practically an apology, and the panel is mounted at seven feet because the installers put them at seven feet, and I am five foot seven, and this is the only moment all day I laugh out loud.
I go to the orchard last. The apple crate is where it's been since the week I started keeping the second ledger, third row in, the hollowed one with a false slat over the top of it.
I meant to write Cole a note. I've been composing it since four this morning. Then I stand there with the pencil in my hand and work out that there's no post box on this side of the gate, no hand to carry it, no vehicle, no Nora anymore, and nothing I write on this property can leave this property.
So I write it anyway and put it in the crate with the ledger.
I'm not frightened. I'm just out of doors.
The last thing on my walk is the utility corridor. It runs the length of the east basement and comes out at a door in the north wall that nobody has used since the boiler was replaced.
The door has a bolt. A plain steel barrel bolt, older than the house system, older than the marriage. And the bolt is on the inside.
I stand with my hand on it and it's cold enough to hold on to.
“Everything in this house locks from the side he's standing on,” I say to nobody. “Except this.”
I don't move it. I don't oil it. I write it in the crate that night in three words and I tell no one, not Cole, not Rachel, not the deputy with the flattened nose who gave me her card in the diner and told me to call from a phone that wasn't mine.
Here's what's left. I'm inside. So is every single thing he's hiding.
Dinner is roast chicken and it's very good, because he cooked it, because he cooks when he's won something.
He asks Aldred about the cello he keeps in a case at home and hasn't touched in eleven years. He gets the whole story. He laughs in the right place, and it's a real laugh, and Aldred sits up straighter over his plate the way people do when Julian turns the lamp of himself onto them.
“Tell him about the crane driver, love,” Julian says.
“You always tell that one better than I do.”
“Only because I watched you come home from it.”
He tells it better than I would — the roof job I ran at twenty-nine, the driver who wouldn't lift in a crosswind, the two days I sat in a site hut with a flask and won. He's proud of me out loud, in front of the doctor who's been retained to write down what's wrong with me.
I watch it work on a clever man in rimless glasses across a dish of potatoes, and I understand exactly how six years happened.
At half past ten I come out of my room and the mag on my own door lets go with the small clean sound it has made every night since I moved in.
The reading nook door is shut and there's a strip of lamplight under it, steady, the width of a pencil. Somebody in there turns a page. My chair creaks the way it creaks for me.
Six years of that sound. I've heard it through a fever, through the first winter, through the night I came home from the hospital and slept sitting up.
And it has never once occurred to me until this evening that it's a magnet, and a magnet is a machine, and every machine in the world is downstream of a power supply.
The microwave clock says 10:40 when I come into the kitchen. Julian is rinsing the roasting tin by hand, sleeves turned back twice.
“Do you need anything before I go up?” he says. “There's the blue blanket in the study, and I could bring you the good pillow off my side, since I'm not using it well.”
The ring comes off easier than it should. It's been sliding since the hospital — it turns loose on the finger when I carry anything, and I've caught it twice on the stair rail, and for three months I've been curling that hand shut without noticing I was doing it.
I stop curling it. I take the band between finger and thumb and it comes away over the knuckle with nothing to it at all.
I set it on the granite. It ticks once, one small hard sound, and settles.
He looks at it. He looks at it for exactly as long as it takes a man to decide not to.
“It's been loose since the hospital.” He turns the tap off. “You should have said — I'd have had it sized.”
Then nothing.
I stand there with a white band of skin on my hand and the counter between us and I wait for him to ask me the question, because there is a question, and it's sitting on the granite in platinum where either of us could reach it.
He dries his hands. He hangs the towel on the rail, folded, the way he hangs it. He checks the burner knobs with two fingers, left to right, the way he checks them every night of his life.
“There's chicken enough for sandwiches,” he says. “Simon eats at seven, so don't wait for him if you're hungry earlier.”
I could take a fight. I've got a fight in me, banked and ready, and I have had it in me since the gala. A fight has two sides bearing load and you can feel where it'll go.
He won't pick it up. He won't pick it up because picking it up would mean the ring on the counter is a thing that happened, and if he never says it, then a woman in his kitchen simply put an item down.
“Goodnight, darling,” he says, at the door, warm as bread. “Sleep as long as you can. Nobody's waking you for anything.”
The stairs. His feet on the fourth tread, the seventh, the landing.
I go down through the east corridor with no light on and put my hand on that bolt again, because I need one thing tonight that answers to me, and it does, cold and rough and mine.
The ring is still on the counter when I come through at eleven. He has wiped the granite around it in a circle and left it exactly where it fell.
“Sleep well, Evelyn,” AURA says, in a dead woman's voice, warm as a hand between the shoulders. “Your door is secured for the night.”